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While we in the WU did not, by some grace, become terrorists, we were wrong and destructive. We did lose our way.

As a former member of the Weather Underground, I feel compelled to add my voice to the recently re-heated discussion of the group’s legacy.

I co-wrote and signed the original document that announced the formation of a radical tendency at the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) National Convention in the summer of 1969. We became known as the Weathermen, drawing the title of our position paper from the Dylan lyric “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” and transformed ourselves into the Weather Underground (WU) over the course of the next year. Because of my involvement with the WU, I became a fugitive in 1970; by 1978 I turned myself in to government authorities.

I write now to paint a more accurate picture of the past for new activists as they face decisions about future direction – especially in moments of inevitable frustration.

A number of issues have been conflated that need to be disentangled at the outset. These are questions about (a) what is terrorism, (b) the appropriateness of any form of violence as a strategy, (c) how (not) to work through differences in a comradely fashion, as fellow participants in a common movement for social change, and finally (d) movement building.

Let’s begin with the most explosive issue.

What is terrorism?

During the 2008 presidential campaign, the Right successfully linked the actions of the WU to present-day terrorism.

Bill Ayers is mainly correct in denying that charge as a libel on the antiwar movement as a whole, and on the WU in particular. From any detached perspective, the Vietnam/American war-era antiwar movement was basically nonviolent, if sometimes quite agitated.

As I understand it, terrorism refers to the killing of innocent civilians for political reasons; therefore all forms of nongovernmental violence do not qualify as terrorism. The WU, while undoubtedly breaking from nonviolence, never advocated a strategy of terror or called for or carried out any attacks on civilians.

It is disingenuous, however, to represent, as Ayers did in the New York Timesin December, that we in the WU were merely one wing of the antiwar movement. [Editor’s note: Read Ayers’ recent In These Times article looking back on the Vietnam era and the 2008 presidential campaign here.] His interpretation obscures what at the time was a big difference. Not only did we pride ourselves on having moved beyond the reformism of the antiwar movement and consider ourselves to be a revolutionary alternative, but few in the antiwar movement claimed us.

This is not the whole story. Ayers’s tale glosses over some important points, especially the actions of the 1970 Townhouse collective–a New York-based political formation designed to carry on illegal activities–whose failed efforts resulted in the deaths of three members of the WU.

After we decided in late 1969 to create a national underground organization that could carry on illegal–and sometimes violent activities–beyond the reach of the criminal justice system, collectives were set up in a few places that were centers of antiwar or anti-racist activity. The collective in New York came to be called the Townhouse Collective after a bomb that collective members were assembling in a Manhattan townhouse exploded prematurely.

On its own initiative, this collective had planned to attack a Non-Commissioned Officers’ (NCO) dance at Ft. Dix with a fragmentation bomb. Had this action been carried out, it would have undoubtedly led to the deaths of not only officers, but also their dates and other bystanders – by any definition, an act of terrorism. Instead, the device went off accidentally and killed three WU members of the Townhouse Collective.

This failed action set off an intense debate in the then newly formed WU organization that culminated in the critique of the Townhouse Collective’s “military error” in a publicly released WU communiqué entitled “New Morning.” While critical of the “heavier the better” mentality that promoted and celebrated political violence per se, the document fell well short of providing a full and honest examination and critique of Townhouse politics.

A chill in WU frenzy and attempts to reconnect with other activists and tendencies paralleled this limited self-critique. Internal discussions became less aggressive and accusatory; attempts were made to work with, and sometimes to try to lead, or manipulate, the aboveground mass movement.

While “New Morning” signaled the WU’s commitment to taking greater care after the accident to target property and not people, it did not acknowledge the WU’s own responsibility for the politics of the Townhouse collective.

WU leaders––then and since––failed to reckon candidly and directly with what it meant, politically and humanly, that core members of the organization had planned to use fragmentation bombs to kill attendees at a dance.

Prior to the Townhouse disaster, the WU had been obsessed with critiquing bourgeois ambivalence or cowardice, which allegedly was holding people back from armed resistance, with little notion or fear that unrestrained militancy could become inhumane as well as dangerous for the movement. At the Flint conference in December 1969, Weather leaders evoked Charles Manson and attendees danced while making the sign of the fork, a Manson symbol.

So while the WU did pull back from the precipice of a terrorist strategy, it never forthrightly admitted to the tendency that had grown and been nurtured within it.

After the WU dissolved in 1977-78 and most of its members turned themselves in to state authorities, there remained a leftover grouplet connected to members of the May 19 Communist Organization (an aboveground group linked to the WU which functioned in the New York area between 1978 and 1985) that was critical of any compromise with the state. It was this small group that, in tandem with elements of the Black Liberation Army, carried out the armed Brinks robbery in 1981, during which two police officers were killed.

Whatever its political pretensions, this valedictory act signaled a final disconnect from the larger political movement and a further descent into pointless revolutionary posturing.

Violence as strategy

Given that the WU managed to refrain from terrorism, did a strategy involving the use of nonterrorist violence help to end the war against Vietnam or lead to fundamental political and social change in the late ’60s or early ’70s?

WU leaders, then and since, have justified their actions as a form of “armed propaganda”: blowing up symbolic targets to emphatically make important political points and widen the spectrum of opposition, with the extra benefit of legitimizing more moderate actions. But there is little reason to believe that militant nonviolence, like that advocated by pacifist and antiwar activist Dave Dellinger, would not have done as well with a less severe downside.

We in the WU argued that militant nonviolence had been found wanting in stopping the war; we felt something more was urgently needed. However, there is no evidence that armed propaganda succeeded where militant nonviolence fell short. The WU argument only makes sense if its long-term aim was to set the stage for an armed overthrow of the state – a wildly wrong reading of the times.

The WU was not the only group that engaged in armed actions. Between 1968 and 1970, there was a spate of “trashings,” bombings and street riots. Groups such as the Black Panthers, White Panthers, Black Liberation Army and many armed “affinity groups” saw a turn to some kind of armed action as both necessary and feasible. It distorts history to frame the WU as the only group–or even the only white group–advocating forms of armed resistance.

There were also those who argued for the legitimacy of armed resistance–defending its use in national liberation struggles, for instance–without trying to implement it as an appropriate strategy for that historical moment in the United States. Armed resistance was on the minds of many of the most dedicated activists. I am not suggesting that armed action was a sound strategic choice, but rather that it was in the realm of possibility for many activists in the United States who desperately sought an end to racism, the U.S. war on Southeast Asia and the entire U.S. imperial project.

What lay behind the WU trajectory, however, was not merely frustration with the shortcomings of the “aboveground” movement, or long-term strategic thinking. It was an attempt to prove revolutionary mettle in the imagined spirit of the Vietnamese resistance or the Black Panthers. There was an eagerness to demonstrate in practice that white radicals could risk the same commitments as these revolutionary icons. We would not sell out or be co-opted. This was still the stance of many of the former WU members featured in the 2002 documentary film The Weather Underground.

Despite some bravado, I myself was a cautious person looking to break the shackles of bourgeois detachment. I felt real relief in seemingly giving my all. But at the same time, I was terrified. Such existential “acting out” does not ordinarily lead to political good sense. The importance of demonstrating revolutionary credentials or moral purity gets in the way of clear thinking about how to strengthen the movement or take advantage of political opportunities.

Other longtime activists argued that our actions would isolate the movement, obscure its message, and sabotage priorities: We dismissed all of these criticisms as examples of white privilege, if not cowardice. Counter-arguments served mainly to convince us of our own revolutionary righteousness. Not even Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton’s labeling us “Custeristic”–for the 1969 Days of Rage demonstration, which he accurately saw as self-destructive–slowed us down.

Get with–or out of–the program

This brings us directly to the notorious arrogance of the Weather people. During that first crazed year of willing “the underground” into existence, we perceived other activists as loath to go the last mile and risk their futures; we had no embarrassment in calling out other activists for not being “with the program.” We held a general contempt for all parts of the movement who failed to heed our call. This coincided with abusive internal criticism and self-criticism sessions to purge bourgeois “individualism” and gird members for the struggle.

While many forms of deep personal transformation can take on an unbecoming stridency, our over-the-top special pleading went beyond adolescent obnoxiousness and played a significant role in imploding the late ’60s left.

For example, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) (from which the WU emerged) itself contained many deep internal contradictions–regarding Marxism-Leninism, internal democracy and sexism, to name a few divisive issues–that threatened its organizational integrity. But surely the Weather tendency’s strident divisiveness played a catalytic role in the demise of SDS as a core radical student organization.

Movement building

By allowing our frustration and revolutionary airs to trump our political common sense, we disowned one of the ’60s-era organizers’ greatest contributions to leftist politics–the revival of what has been termed the “organizing tradition.” This was the tradition, focused on long-term change and bottom-up politics that animated the Civil Rights, Black Freedom, Women’s Liberation and antiwar movements.

This organizing tradition, which the WU abandoned, has a developmental, long-haul perspective and an emphasis on building relationships that endure. It respects collective leadership and holds that the best movement leaders should have ongoing, accountable relations with their bases–the grassroots. Its anti-bureaucratic ethos and preference for connecting issues and organizing around peoples’ everyday lives create an expansive notion of democracy.

This conception of organizing goes beyond mobilizing, disdains vanguardism, requires patience and emphasizes the centrality of building new leadership. The organizing tradition was most fully embodied in the practice of early Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organizers, but also revivified in Women’s Liberation groups and even some SDS chapters.

Out of sheer impatience and an inflated sense of vanguardism, the WU rejected this empowering tradition. Ironically, the WU understood the painstaking work of grassroots organizing as a sign of white privilege. This work required waiting too long while the world was in tumult.

The WU favored more dramatic action that ended up disconnecting the purported leadership from any mass base, leaving it unaccountable (except self-glorifyingly to a nebulous “people of the world”) in its self-defined trajectory. The WU rationalized its practice by attacking any possible base as too privileged, too corrupted by consumerism and imperialism.

Many WU cadre had been effective, energetic, even gifted organizers–but by the late ’60s such work seemed like too little, too late. The war was raging, the people of the world were in an uproar–where were we? From the WU perspective, white people were self-indulgently tarrying and oppressed people were bearing the brunt of imperial and racist power. We thought it was high time to up the ante.

One need not equate the relentless, pounding violence of the American war on Vietnam or against the Black Freedom movement with the small-time violent actions of the WU in order to be critical of the direction we set. While we in the WU did not, by some grace, become terrorists, we were wrong and destructive. We did lose our way. We were not demons, but we did succumb to our own fantasy of revolutionary pride.

For me, the overall lesson is this: Despite the desperation of any given political moment, we can only have a chance at success by deeply understanding that our goal must be to build humane power. We must remain alert to opportunities in current political realities, rather than act out fantasies of revolutionary prowess in frustration.

Similar temptations toward what has been variously called “infantile” leftism, “phallic” politics, or “petit-bourgeois” adventurism have not disappeared – they reappear in new guises, but parade with the same heedlessness and self-importance. The “fierce urgency of now” is always with us, but the struggle to maintain one’s humanity in building a movement for social justice in an oppressive world has a more profound urgency.

Howard Machtinger, a former member of Students For a Democratic Society and a founding member of Weatherman (later Weather Underground), is a retired teacher, but remains politically active and still believes in the need for social and political transformation--hopefully in the spirit of the "organizing tradition."

Michael Mc, I couldn't agree more. If we ever become a social democracy, I'll celebrate and probably not mind that we didn't have a revolution. Maybe we won't need one.Posted by mimsky on 2009-02-23 17:27:41

Personally, I never thought there was much of a possibility of revolution in America. I mean, if we didn't have one in 1932, for example, then just when would the conditions be right for one? Even today, with capitalism in a global meltdown, I don't see any sign of revolution in America. Certainly, there is plenty of discontent, anger, alienation, and all that, but it's not really new.
In the late-1960s, when middle class was much larger, and the welfare state and organized labor still existed, revolution in America was a truly delusional proposition--just the well-known youthful radical chic of Baby Boomers, which I never took very seriously.
Of course, there's always the possibility of revolution from the right, a revolution that manages to exploit all the alienation and discontent in society in a sort of racist, nationalist, fundamentalist movement, like the Know Nothings or the KKK. In this country, the last revolution from the right was actually that of the Confederate States in 1860-61, a revolution to conserve the aristocracy of the slave holding South and its (mostly) agrarian economy.
Needless to say, Jeff Davis and the Confederate States of America is not change I can believe in, no matter that I had ancestors on both sides of the question--quite literally brother against brother, in fact. Historically speaking, though, my best guess is that a revolution from the right is more likely in America than one from the left. Personally, I would prefer us to become a nice, secure social democracy like Canada or Denmark rather than be taken over by some fascist or right-wing populist movement.
we could do worse than social democracy, and often we have.
Michael C. McHughPosted by mcmchugh99 on 2009-02-23 05:52:00

I admire the courage and honesty of our author to criticize wrongs, including his own. Such were the problems I had as a college student with WU--I agreed with the Dellinger approach then and now. Good for you for making this analysis and I'm glad you're still in the Left movement. We are not in a revolutionary situation, but we need patient organizing and action for sure. I do wish you'd mentioned the labor movement as the initial American organizing model. It, after all, invented sit-ins and several leaders mentored SNCC...the CIO of the 1930's was plenty militant and we need to look back at that period more for tactics and inspiration. Stay with us and contribute more ideas.Posted by mimsky on 2009-02-19 20:44:44

I was only ten years old ni 1969, studying pictures of Howard's friend (alomng with Nixon's, of course...) in LIFE Magazine. LIFE was a weird experience--those pics from Viet Nam (the screaming girl during a napaplm attack...) didn't jibe with what I was being taught in school about American military honor; Woodstock and Coumbia and Chicago didn't look anything like my small suburban town.
I've read a lot about Weather Underground since--Dan Berger's book seems pretty comprehensive, if a bit biased. I've followed Bill Ayer's statements over the course, especially recently. Have to say that Howard's essay here is one of the best analyses I've come across--heartfelt, critical in the best sense of the world and very relevant indeed.
In regard to that damned label "Terrorism," I find Howard's definition a tad restrictive; I find most definitions too restrictive, because, having euqated terrorism with evil, the problem is that everyone wants to use the word to define that-which-WE-do-not-do. Thus, planting bombs in the Pentagon--or smashing up storefronts on the streets of Chicago--isn't terrorism because terror involves deliberate homicide. Conversely, "Shock and Awe" isn't "terrorism, because it's a "military operation."
Maybe a good working re-definition would be something along the lines of, "acts motivated by some political program and aiming at a political goal, whose symbolic value--designed to shock a wide audience by instilling fear--trump the actual value of the resulting damage itself." Mailing anthrax, 9/11, firebombing Tokyo, KKK lynchings, WU blowing up the Haymarket statue (WU), "Shock and Awe" all fit under this heading. Random, psychopathic actions don't.
I don't think most individual or groups decide, "let's be terrorists!" They devise a plan suited to a particular goal, one which may wind up falling under that rubric. There's really no such thing a a "terrorist"--there are individuals who have, rightly or wrongly, utilized these methods in pursuit of specific goals.
Which leads to the question: is terrorism ever justified? I'd be curious to know what Howard thinks of ELF and ALF, groups that feel that asymettrical warfare is the only tactic available to them in the face of corporate rule and public complaisance.
After reading what I have, I found myself sympathetic with many of WU's ideological underpinnings, but appalled at the extremes--even the rhetorical extremes-- to which members would go. Howard mentions the Manson "fork" sign, but doesn't explain its revolting significance, nor Ms Dohrn's comments at Flint about the Tate-LaBianca murders. Hating the Pentagon at the time? I get that. Celebrating Sharon Tate's death, and the fork business? It's hard for me to understand how kids would get off on it, how anyone would still want to be a part of the organization after hearing that kind of thing. Gangsta's don't even talk like that .
Thanks again, Howard, for a truly reflective essay. Most stuff tends to be either " mea culpa, mea culpa--everything we thought and said was wrong!," or "I'd do it all over again," or the hedging Ayers manages so well. This seems to me to one of the more honest attempts to come to terms with both a personal past and a historical moment whose memory lingers.
michael horan
http://www.nosuppertonight.comPosted by nosuppertonight.com on 2009-02-19 16:19:54

While a year or two too young to have run with the actual Weather Underground I was in several revolutionary collectives with people who were or had been members of the Weathermen (changed to WU because it was sexist). As a member of RYM-2, among others, I participated in acts of violence against carefully selected targets (that were absent of any humans at the time of our attacks) as well as intentionally violent street actions in and around Washington, D.C.
Among the interminable 20+ hour meetings we had, more than one discussed the issue of terrorism and we decided that it was never justified and that civilian deaths were to be avoided when ever possible.
The issues the author of this article addresses are those my comrades and IPosted by Stannous Flouride on 2009-02-19 11:35:59

Zachary -- I think your definition of terrorism is too broad, and doesn't acknowledge important distinctions. The act of aiming matters, and trying to avoid murder matters. When the WU bombed the Pentagon, they were not engaged in random violence meant to terrorize a whole population; they were attacking the center of American military power. And even then, they warned the authorities of the presence of the bomb in such a way as to prevent human casualties. Whether you would support their cause or not, if any target was ever a legitimate military target, it's the Pentagon. That's not to say that the act of bombing the Pentagon was prudent or even ethical, but it can be wrong without being terrorism. And that's true even if the goal was chiefly media exposure (which seems to me a tendentious claim). The Doolittle raid on Japan in WWII was chiefly symbolic and had no real military significance, but that by itself doesn't make that act terrorism, does it?Posted by slabarge on 2009-02-19 11:12:56

one could say lexington and concord were 'terrorists' acts. one can say anything. understanding is a different bag of tricks. the flawed thinking of the WU was that the masses were fed up enough to act. they were not. they are not.Posted by jefferymcnary on 2009-02-19 10:30:46

Dave -- you make a valid point in that the chaos and various forms of insurrection in the late '60s and early '70s had some impact on the ability of the government to conduct the war in Indochina and, probably less so, on repression in this country. There is a story that when Curtis Lemay proposed use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson asked 'and where will you be when people break into the White House to lynch me?'
Certainly some leaders, Johnson amongst them, included the 'loss of a generation' in their calculations of the cost of war. For that purpose, it certainly didn't hurt that some of the leaders of the Weather Underground, like Bill Ayers, were children of the elite. Some of us, even outside the WU, came to the conclusion that simply hastening the destruction of the US would be a kind of liberation for the rest of the world from US Imperialism -- regardless of the consequences for the population of this country, which was seen as hopelessly compromised by 'white skin privilege.'
We were wrong. Movements like the WU, filled with contempt for the working class in this country, could never build a real movement in solidarity with people struggling for justice in other countries. In retrospect, the inflated self-importance of those groups seems to have a greater identity with the ambitions of a dry drunk like George W Bush than with the emerging movements now seeking change from the ground up.
Howie's piece speaks to some of the lessons learned from a difficult period and the challenges of building a movement. It is a conversation we should continue.Posted by Bruce Johnson on 2009-02-19 07:32:04

I disagree with the definition of terrorism. Terror is the root, not murder. Murderism could be terrorism, but only because murder can cause terror. Is systemic repression through torture terrorism? Can't rape be used as a tool of terror? Focusing on death misses the point. Terrorism is about more than just death.
Bombings meant more for generating coverage than causing a reduction in tactical or strategic capabilities are most definitely terrorism.
I'm a liberal, I am not a Republican, and I still think that the Pentagon bombing was a terrorist act. I am appalled that Ayers is as public a figure as he is. Mr. Machtinger at least wrestles with what he has done.Posted by Zachary Neal on 2009-02-19 07:00:49

Todd, I believe what he meant was that not all forms of nongovernmental violence qualify. In other words, some do. Including most if not all that you cite.Posted by Dave Lippman on 2009-02-18 20:07:44

I don't follow Machtinger's logic when he says:
"As I understand it, terrorism refers to the killing of innocent civilians for political reasons; therefore all forms of nongovernmental violence do not qualify as terrorism."
9/11, drug beheadings in Tijuana, the Oklahoma City bombing, anthrax mailings, etc., etc., are apparently not terrorism according to his reckoning.
I believe Machtinger needs to re-read his dictionary.Posted by todd saalman on 2009-02-18 16:31:22

Agreed, mostly, but I think you can make the case that the frustration boiling over among the youth, the trashings and street fighting you cite, did threaten the warmakers' sense of security, along with the large demonstrations and of couirse the rebellion in the military and the resistance of the black populace and the Vietnamese. There's no reason to think that persistent non-violent organizing, escalating only into voluntary submission to arrest, would have threatened them. A high US official said at the time, "Let's face it, we're in a war with the kids, and the kids are winning." I think that referred to, more than anything, the escalating tactics in the streets, if not the WU.Posted by Dave Lippman on 2009-02-18 07:42:44